Evo Weekend is here: How to watch the Fighting Game Event of the Year

Enlarge / Crowds this year will be smaller and hidden, but offline is back in Vegas Evo

After a two-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, the Evolution Championship Series (better known as Evo), the annual celebration of all fighting games, is back in Las Vegas this week-end. Thousands of players and fighting game fans will fill the halls and arena of the Mandalay Bay Casino to try to get into the top 8, participate in casual games with people from all over the world, watch panels, browse Artist Alley and simply soaking up a chance to be offline again with the fighting game community.

In a more normal year I would be there myself, maybe not trying to finish in the top 8, rather than trying not to go 0-2 in Street Fighter V or Third Strike. But despite a strong mask and vaccine policy, I just don't feel like traveling or being in Vegas with the current state of the world. So I'm going to be spending my weekend comfortably at home streaming a ridiculous amount of content and trying not to feel like I'm missing too much. If you'd like to join me, here's a quick guide to what the weekend has to offer.

An overview of Evo

You may have heard of Evo before, perhaps from the infamous Evo Moment 37 video or Sony's acquisition of the tournament series in 2021. If you're not already a Watcher of fighting game tournaments, here are the basics of how Evo works. There are eight main featured games, which I will list below, plus a huge amount of less official side tournaments. Each game has the same basic structure, you start in a pool of players, everyone on an equal footing. The tournaments are double elimination, which means that you must lose twice to be eliminated. If you can win multiple matches in your pool without being eliminated, you move on to the next one, eventually leading to a top 24, then a top 8, which leads to the grand final.

Part of the excitement of looking at pools is the surprise. The previous champion has to start like everyone else, and there's no guarantee that some stranger won't inflict their first defeat on them, putting them in the losing group and one game away from losing that dream of repetition of the top 8.

As you progress through matches, the level of play gets higher and tense, so if you're less inclined to spend hours watching, the safe bet is to catch a top 24 or d wait for the top 8 to see the real high stakes matches unfold.

Each game will feature commentary from people who are expert in understanding and explaining the on-screen action. With a few basics under your belt and their patterns, you should be able to follow even games you're unfamiliar with.

The key to understanding the double-elimination format is that everyone starts in the winner's bracket. If you lose once, you go to the losers bracket. Lose from there and you can sit back and watch the rest, you're done. Mathematically this means that when you get to the top 8, half will be in the losing pool, the other half in the winning pool, and the Grand Finals match will have a winning side and a losing side.

To win the whole tournament on the losing side, you have to beat the other player twice, once to send it to the loser (known as bracket reset). Racing a loser is no easy task, but a support reset always gets the crowd excited. They like an underdog, but that also means another set to watch.

If you see an L or W next to someone's name on the stream overlay, that indicates whether they're playing in the winner's or loser's bracket. The last thing you need to know is that most games go first to second, so you have to win two games to beat someone. This usually becomes the first to three top 8 wins.